In the Flesh: The Shield

Imagine if Law and Order had ended with detectives Munch and Finn executing a murder/suicide pact with their families in a fleabag motel. Imagine old-fashioned hound dog Lennie Briscoe joining ICE to save his ass from a laundry list of his own pitch-black misdeeds. One day you’re watching a more or less boilerplate police procedural with the twist that the cops are a mix of characters both crooked and earnest, the next you’re on a Nantucket sleigh ride to Hell. That’s The Shield, Shawn Ryan’s massively popular and completely insane 2002-2008 police corruption drama. Part demented Right Wing fantasy, part cop drama, part pseudo-HBO prestige hit, The Shield is all of these things, and none of them. On the one hand it’s a show in which Glenn Close and Forest Whitaker show up to put in barn-burner guest performances. On the other, it’s a show in which the nerdy nice guy cop, Dutch Wagenbach (Jay Karnes) strangles a cat to death in order to understand the motivation behind serial murder.

I will say directly, the vast majority of The Shield is missable. You can go watch Miami Vice or Heat or Inside Man and save yourself the time. You can house the first two seasons of True Detective in a few days and get most of what The Shield has to offer with a lot of gorgeous visuals in the bargain. Most conversations are contrived, circular, or both. The interrogation scenes are laughable. Most characters who aren’t Detective Vick Mackey (Michael Chiklis) don’t really go anywhere. What you can’t get from any of those other shows or movies, though, is the marvel of watching a procedural, the most staid and status-quo obsessed species of television program imaginable, spend its final two seasons ripping itself apart with its own fingernails as it catches on fire in slow motion. In the space of about fifteen episodes, the show’s major characters wind up dead, consigned to existential torture, imprisoned, or in witness protection.

The Shield is insane. It’s a madman’s unintentional masterpiece, a demented fantasia of ethnic gang violence, borderline phrenological police profiler pseudoscience, and Autism Speaks talking points. It’s an accidental portrait of dead-eyed, hollow suburban Americans obsessed with their own feelings as Bush’s reign gives way to Obama’s, who like some kind of avenging angel descends unseen on Los Angeles in the series finale. Chiklis, who aside from CCH Pounder as dogged detective and later police captain Claudette Wyms is the show’s only real heavy hitter in the acting department, finally delivers on the promise of his terrifying dead-eyed stare following his execution of a mole in his own unit in the series premiere in this final stretch. His red-faced, silent rage, his first agonizing and then rote confession to his handler as he scrambles out of his collapsing career as a dirty cop and into a prophetically evil position at the newly-formed ICE, his final look of haunted despair as he realizes all the maneuvering in the world won’t unchain him from the desk his supervisors have chained him to in order to distance themselves from his toxicity, it’s incredible work. It’s worth the tedium, just to watch it all burn.